There’s an old Bugs Bunny cartoon with the punchline, “What’d ya expect in a opera – a happy ending?” It’s a fair point. Opera does of course do comedy, but tends to misery/pain/anguish as default positions. And they were defaulting to excess at the start of the year when London’s two main lyric companies – at Covent Garden and the Coliseum – offered, side by side, two of the darkest, most disturbing works in the whole repertoire.
The Covent Garden show was Strauss’s brutally abrasive take on Ancient Greek mythology, Elektra: two hours of emotional assault and battery that must have traumatised the opera’s early Austro-German audiences in the 1900s. You can understand why Sigmund Freud had such a busy workload.
